Bob Denard

Bob Denard, mercenary and coup-master, died on October 13th, aged 78

THERE were usually several versions of any story involving Bob Denard. To explain how he came to be found, in the early hours of November 26th 1989, standing over the blood-soaked and pyjama-clad body of the president of the Comoros Islands, there were three alternatives. One: Mr Denard had shot him. (He denied it in court; though he had been in the same room, and very close to him, he had not pulled the trigger.) Two: the palace bodyguard had burst in wildly, filling the president with bullets. (“Inexplicable,” Mr Denard agreed, but true; “an accident arising out of a general state of madness.”) Or perhaps—mad theory three—an army commandant had fired off an anti-tank missile by mistake, which had crashed through the window of the presidential bedroom.

The French courts never worked it out, and in 1999 acquitted Mr Denard for lack of evidence. His long dark history as a mercenary in Africa, from 1961 onwards, had blurred everything about him. His name was Bob Denard, or Gilbert Bourgeaud, or Colonel Bako, or Mustafa M'hadjou. The wound that made him limp had come from a bullet in Congo, or perhaps in Algeria. His fascination with all things military sprang from a boyhood in the French resistance in the Médoc, or alternatively from his first entranced sighting of the shiny helmets, boots and guns of the German troops invading his village. He had been cashiered from the French navy, at 16, for running riot in a Saigon whorehouse or for burning down a restaurant. Fact or fiction: few knew for sure.

Mr Denard could look gentlemanly, smart in grey suits or his spurious colonel's uniform. He thought the word “mercenary” insulting and torture “repugnant”. Visitors to his beach house in the Comoros might find him, surrounded by his children from seven different pretty women, sipping tea under a frangipani tree. Dom Perignon and paté de foie gras would be shipped out after him when his plots failed. But he was also a brawny, flamboyant soldier in camouflage fatigues, leader of “les affreux” (“the terrible ones”) in the Congo—in fact, le plus affreux des affreux, as he boasted to his men. He did a job in which killing was necessary, sometimes alongside underlings who stubbed out their cigarettes on prisoners' feet or roughly removed their teeth and eyes.

Money was an attraction. When he could, he built up business interests on the side. But he said he could earn more pay as an ordinary soldier; his stronger motives were adventure, “idealism”, and the fact that he was stifling in Paris, “bored shitless”, if he didn't make war somewhere. He fought in cold-war Africa for anti-communist rulers favoured by the West, and for any regime that would help the French, as they let go their colonies, to keep their investments safe and their influence alive.

In breakaway Katanga in the 1960s Mr Denard propped up Moishe Tshombe, a creature of Belgian mining interests in Congo, against a United Nations force. He tried to launch coups in Yemen and Benin and fought for secession in Biafra. His men—usually only a few dozen of them—were generally French, Belgian or South African, well equipped with guns and armoured jeeps, whipping the untrained blacks into shape. Mr Denard himself seemed less racist than his troops, and in the Comoros, having converted to Islam, he wore the robes and cap of a native as he limped to Friday prayers. But he laughed at the thought of democracy in Africa.

An amber light

At certain times his presence was benevolent. In 1964 he and his men saved the whites of the town of Stanleyville, in Congo, from being slaughtered by a drug-crazed mob. His coup in the Comoros in 1978, one of four he engineered in the archipelago between 1975 and 1995, brought in a decade of relative stability while he took charge of the army and the economy and his Garde Presidentielle, their food and black uniforms paid for by South African money, guarded the puppet ruler. He once claimed to be acting in the higher interests of civilisation. Frederick Forsyth, in “The Dogs of War”, may have borrowed from the glamour of his character.

Yet amateurism often dogged his enterprises. Invasions were launched from rusty trawlers and inflatable dinghies and once, in Congo, on bicycles. He crashed in flames more often than he succeeded. If the South Africans did not pull him out to the safety of suburban Pretoria, a French expeditionary force, shiny and efficient, sometimes arrived to remove him before he went too far. On his last coup attempt in the Comoros, in 1995 at the age of 66, his grandfatherly arm was taken gently by French officers before he was led away to face yet more criminal investigations.

A conviction followed in 2006, but no punishment. By this time Mr Denard was ill with Alzheimer's, but there was another reason. De Gaulle's spymaster, Jacques Foccart, had first recruited him for Africa. Subsequent officials at the Elysée had provided money and passports. Asked during one trial whether he had had a green light from the government for his plots, he said no, not exactly; just an amber light, meaning that there was no opposition. He was, he liked to say, a “corsair of the Republic”, implicitly given permission to proceed with dash and without compunction. And so he did.